Friday 12 March 2010 19.05 EST
First published on Friday 12 March 2010 19.05 EST

Whoever hacked into the emails at the University of East Anglia fired the opening salvo in a new kind of dirty war. The Copenhagen conference met on the basis that dealing with global warming was in everyone's interest. The idea that nearly 200 countries could reach meaningful decisions was always unreal, but the meeting's collapse reflected a more fundamental reality.

Environmentalists have always assumed that the threat of disaster will bring about an era of global cooperation. In reality, climate change is triggering another round of geopolitical conflict. Limiting the use of fossil fuels may be essential if disaster is to be avoided, but countries that in different ways rely heavily on these fuels for their prosperity – such as Russia and Saudi Arabia, China and the US – were never going to accept the strict carbon curbs that the EU and others demanded. How much the leaked emails contributed to the breakdown of the summit is unclear, but the effect has been to let those countries, along with the rest of the world, off the hook. The undermining effect on climate science looks like being long-lasting and profound.

"Climategate" was an exercise in postmodern cyber-warfare – a move in a larger conflict that environmentalists show little sign of understanding. In The Empathic Civilization, Jeremy Rifkin suggests that the whole of history is a struggle between the polar forces of empathy and entropy. "There is, I believe, a grand paradox to human history. At the heart of the human saga is a catch-22 – a contradiction of extraordinary significance – that has accompanied our species, if not from the very beginning, then at least from the time our ancestors began their slow metamorphosis from archaic to civilised beings thousands of years before Christ."

The catch-22 is that, as civilisation has extended the reach of empathy beyond the family and the tribe until it covers all of humankind, the expanding infrastructure of industry and transport has needed ever larger inputs of energy, increasing entropy and wrecking the planet.

Moving from hunting and gathering to farming, and then to industrial production, enabled humans to interact with one another as never before, but this increasing interconnection involved depleting the planet, a process that is reaching a climax just as civilisation is becoming planet-wide for the first time. "Our rush to universal empathic connectivity," Rifkin writes, "is running up against a rapidly accelerating entropic juggernaut in the form of climate change and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."

How can this deadly collision be averted? The answer appears to be straightforward: by developing "biosphere consciousness". "Only by concerted action that establishes a collective sense of affiliation with the entire biosphere will we have a chance to ensure our future." In other words, a transformation of consciousness can save humanity from self-destruction.

It is hardly a new story. How often have we heard environmentalists exclaim that the alternatives facing the world are radical transformation or total catastrophe? The trouble is that their analysis of the environmental crisis is extremely shallow. Climate change is not mainly the work of sinister corporate interests and weak-kneed or corrupt politicians. It is a direct result of the energy-intensive civilisation in which the affluent part of humankind lives, and which the rest very much wants to join. While humans are more interdependent than ever before, they are at the same time destabilising the planet. Reining in corporate interests and chivvying politicians to be greener do nothing to resolve this fundamental contradiction.

Where Rifkin departs from the standard green line is in grasping that all of humanity is caught in a trap, but he seems convinced that, provided human empathy continues to expand, the trap can be sprung without too much difficulty. Rifkin's difficulties start with the claim – in itself quite plausible – that the environmental crisis is a catch-22. Joseph Heller's darkly brilliant satire derives its power from the insight that there are dilemmas from which there is no escape: if you are sane enough to ask to be declared unfit to fly on dangerous missions, then you are fit to fly.

The essence of any catch-22 is that there is no way out, but Rifkin shrinks from this cruel logic, with the result that his argument verges on incoherence. How could human empathy possibly defeat the force of entropy, an irreversible physical process? Does Rifkin believe an increase in altruism can lead to the repeal of the second law of thermodynamics?

His practical proposals for dealing with the climate crisis are disappointingly conventional – massive investment in renewable energy and the like – and, in line with standard green thinking, he never explains how a human population of 7 billion, rising to 9 or 10 billion over the next 50 years, can be supported by a mixture of solar panels and hydrogen-powered fuel cells. Stewart Brand's recent Whole Earth Discipline, which argues that coping with environmental breakdown will necessitate making the most of demonised technologies such as nuclear energy and GM food, is more realistic as well as more visionary.

Most of The Empathic Civilization is not in fact concerned with the practical task of coping with the mess humans have made of the planet. Instead it is devoted to defending Rifkin's view that humans are essentially empathic animals, whose benign qualities have not been fully manifested throughout most of their history. "Wanton widespread violence has not been the norm in human history," Rifkin writes, looking back wistfully on the "tranquil agricultural life that existed for thousands of years" before the "mega-machine" of property and government disrupted humankind's natural innocence. One need not be a hardened cynic to find this Rousseauesque tale implausible. Humans may be more moved by empathy than is sometimes allowed, but empathy for the feelings of others is not only expressed in compassion. It is equally the basis of cruelty, a trait that is also distinctively human.

For all its inordinate length, The Empathic Civilization fails to substantiate its central thesis. The innate sociability of human beings is a fact, but it does not follow that they are likely to cooperate in dealing with environmental crisis. The impact of climate change is rather to intensify human conflict. As global warming accelerates, natural resources such as arable land and water become scarcer, and competition to control them will be acute and pervasive. At the same time, those whose power and wealth come from fossil fuels will do anything they can to promote "climate scepticism".

This is where the leaked emails come in. With global warming fuelling a resurgence of geopolitical tensions, climate science has become a weapon in a war of disinformation. Whatever lapses in intellectual probity they might reveal, the messages are being used to obscure a mass of evidence showing that anthropogenic climate change is real, and may be occurring more rapidly than previously believed. It is still possible to frame an intelligent response to the threat, but first we need to recognise that the climate has become a battleground. Empathy won't save us.

John Gray's Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings is published by Penguin.